His daddy issues alone were reason enough not to elect him, in my opinion. It’s fine for an author to make that a central part of his life, but it’s unsuitable in someone who is serving as president.

I’ve long felt that this was a fertile (and largely ignored) field of study — the extent to which policy is driven by a policymaker’s unstated fears and phobias.

I remember thinking about this first after reading Asimov’s “The Gods Themselves”, in which a major policy-maker mounts a one-man political crusade — which is later revealed to be caused by his claustrophobia. (I may be misremembering the details; it’s been a while.)

Similarly, I remember being afraid of guns before my military service. I’ve come around 180 degrees on this issue, but I remember how I used to feel — that holding deadly force in my hands scared me, and that I didn’t trust myself with it, so how could I trust others? I wonder how many anti-gun people feel similarly; I imagine a lot of them do.

(These days, I’d say that if holding deadly force in your hands is scary to you, then maybe you should consider giving up your driver’s license.)

Jerry Pournelle once wrote, in a similar vein, that he’d love to see a history textbook written from the perspective of world leaders and their illnesses. As an example, I believe he cited some decisions made by Elizabeth I, which might have turned out differently had she not been suffering from chronic toothaches at the time.

If you’re fascinated, as I am, by the tiny events that change history — such as the Presidential elections of 1916 and 2000, either of which could have gone the other way were it not for an inconsequential snub at the wrong moment — then these things are very interesting indeed.

And — to the extent that people’s unspoken phobias dictate modern policy — it can be more than a little disturbing. What childhood fears does President Obama have, and to what extent do they influence his policies?

respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline

The reality is we couldn’t harm this planet if it was all of humanity’s goal to do so. The worst we could do is make for very shortlived unsightly surroundings in the blink of an eye that we’re here.

Or like going to bed with Dr. Jekyll, and waking up in the morning with . . . MR HYDE!

What got me was their utter ruthlessness in trying to overturn the 2000 election with an ocean of LIES. I fell for it. And when some of the newspapers admitted, months later, in a very tiny voice, that none of the bad things the Dems accused the Republicans of were true, I knew — they put the Triumph of the Left before Everything.

And would stop at nothing, including destroying the faith of our citizenry in our elections, to achieve this Uber-goal.

Then came September 11th. I saw the covers ripped off their hatred for my country; their sick-making support for our enemies; their relentlessly treasonous souls, and I was so enraged that I’ve never gotten over it. That kicked off a process of turning over a lot of Leftist rocks to see how many More worms I’d find.

It’s unbelievable how very much, and for how very long, they’ve lied. Someone linked to George Monbiot’s discovery that Helen Caldicott, the “saint” of the No-Nukes crowd, is an unscientific crank. He’s a leftist himself, but he’s starting to look at facts and evidence, and he’s shocked to the core that her arguments against nuclear power are almost wholly a tissue of lies and gross exaggerations.

He quotes a scientist who was part of the official post-Chernobyl investigation, who said he was anti-nuclear power, until participating in that investigation showed him he’d been fed lies and hysteria about nuclear power. Now he’s for it!

I am convinced that a very big reason that we become more “conservative” as we age is that we have a broader life experience, so that, eventually one of their lies crosses what we have experienced in the real world. The more calcified “liberals” do not just live in a media or political cocoon. They do, but there’s more. It seems, rather, and often, too, that they continue to live in an economic cocoon, a university, a type of job, usually governmental, that never has its ups and downs. They’ve never sued anyone, nor been sued, nor filed for bankruptcy protection, nor lost a house in foreclosure, nor bought one that way, either. If they’ve been in our country’s armed services, they mostly see an outfit that would prosecute them if they committed atrocities, not one that sends them on search and rape missions. This reality reinforcement is also the reason that more modest income people often vote Republican, because folks at that income level know what is involved in receiving government largess. They/we scream, sooner or later, “Don’t help me any more! I can’t afford it!”